Tim Bray: "The Web isn’t a platform or a database or an API or an OS a cloud or aclickstream or any other of those things.In fact, the Web isn’t even a thing,it’s a mesh of agreements with a nice straightforward engineering rulebook.Play by the rules and you can be part of it and build something great,struggle against them and you’ll look lame and you’ll fail. But don’t try to analogize it; sometimesthe world has new things in it and you just have to deal with them as they are."

+1.

Sam disagrees. I'll definitely admit that metaphors can be good, for certain audiences; but they can also get in the way, especially when they're vague and take longer to explain than the code they're meant to describe.[Read More]

ARI Proposal: "The fundamental goal of ARI is to provide a high-quality andfunctionally-complete reference implementation of the Atom SyndicationFormat (RFC4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol specificationspublished by the IETF Atompub working group."

Just a couple of minutes ago I sent off a new proposal to the Apache Incubator PMC to consider incubation of "ARI", a reference implementation of the Atom Syndication Format and Atom Publishing Protocol specifications.

From the proposal: "The initial scope of the project will be the development of aJava-language reference implementation of the Atom Syndication Formatand Atom Publishing Protocol specifications, along with a selection ofextensions and utility functions. It is expected, however, that C/C++and possibly other language implementations will be explored in thefuture.

The Atom Syndication Format implementation will include ahigh-performance parser and serializer for Atom documents, a set ofAPI's for working with the Atom data model, support for a variety ofextensions to the Atom format, and support for various advancedfeatures such as XPath, XML Digital Signatures, Feed paging, etc.

The Atom Publishing Protocol implementation will include both clientand server implementations designed with the dual purpose ofdemonstrating the proper function of the protocol and providing thetools necessary to build and deploy Atom Publishing-based applications."

The initial source for the proposed project is available at http://www.snellspace.com/public/ari.tar.gz. The code was written initially to support internal IBM development efforts around Atom. From the very beginning it was my intention to pursue open sourcing the code. Last week we secured the final legal approvals to take the code public.

Kurt Cagle: "...Not long after this, however, there came a surprise announcement fromthe OpenDocument Foundation. Gary Edwards of the foundation reported toMassachussets that they had just developed (and were in the finalstages of testing) just such a plugin that would work for the mostrecent version of Office … and back as far as Office 97. What thismeans is that anyone using any supported and most legacy versions ofOffice will be able shortly to work with ODF documents in Office, willbe able to save out to ODF and will be able to accurately see any ODFcontent in the same way that they could via Open Office 2.0. The pluginwill be freely available, and because it will work with Word, Excel,etc., people under the various Accessibility acts who use specializedreaders from Office can also use those same ODF documents, one of thebiggest stumbling blocks that the ODF standard had to hurdle."

Nice. If I still used Office or Windows XP, I'd be very happy about this. [Read More]

I have several hundred feeds that I follow in my feedreader. I've just gone through an cleaned them up a bit, removing old subscriptions, reorganizing, reprioritizing, etc. One change that I made was to pass all non-Atom 1.0 feeds through the Google Reader engine so that all my feed reader ever sees are well-formed Atom 1.0 feeds.

Over on the personal blog... Atom and the Google Data API: "I’m going to take the next week and go through a number of comparisons/ notes regarding the Atom Publishing Protocol, Google’s Data API, somethoughts on IBM’s approach to the protocol, and general thoughts on theright and wrong ways to extend Atom."